Apple expands its Maps vehicle program to new countries, new cities in U.S., UK

Apple has expanded its Apple Maps vehicle program, sending out vans to new places like France and Sweden while expanding supported U.S. cities.

The vans are all equipped with cameras and advanced sensors that Apple hopes will improve their mapping service, which is still second-best compared to Google's long standing service. Apple also hopes to improve their 3D imagery and to improve on street level views of locations.

Apple will send out vans to France throughout August, but it is unclear when you might see them in your Swedish town.

In addition, the UK and U.S. will get improved service as a number of cities are already scheduled to be surveyed.

Well they gotta catch up. Goofle updated our street view in the last year or two. Our Solar panels are now showing in the image. This this the "bottom" of the world here... doubt if Apple would make the effort.

While iOS, itself, is a solid product, APple has NEVER been all that good with the other software associated with the ecosystem. Their current struggles with iTunes mediocrity are a perfect example.

I attribute this to two main causes. First, it's simply the almost inevitable "arteriosclerosis" any super-large, monolithic company eventually faces. Other good examples are GE, the big American car makers, M$, and so on. In contrast, AT&T boomed once it was forced to split, back in the '80s.

Second, the very consistency that is a big strength of iOS, is also one of it's greatest weaknesses, in my opinion. Compared to Android, iOS devs simply can be a lot lazier and take both their hardware and users for granted. That's not really a viable tactic, however, for Android ^^' ...